Her parents, a prosperous couple who owned a hatmaking factory,[3] sent her to Ibstock, a progressive school in Roehampton run on Fröbel principles.

[5] She passed the entrance exam for St Paul's Girls' School the following year,[5] and developed an interest in art while there.

[7] She held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s, becoming friends with painters such as Howard Hodgkin, Robyn Denny and Roger Hilton.

[citation needed][11] One of Ayres' early projects was a 1957 commission by architect Michael Greenwood to decorate the South Hampstead High School dining hall in north London.

The murals, described as "the only true British contribution to American abstract expressionism", were quickly covered over with wallpaper before being rediscovered in 1983 in nearly perfect condition.

[12] Ayres was a dedicated printmaker, making prints with Jack Shirreff in Wiltshire, and in her later life with Peter Kosowicz at Thumbprint Editions, London.

[18] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

[25][26] On 24 May 2004, 14 of Ayres' pieces were destroyed in a fire at a warehouse of the art-storage company Momart in the Cromwell industrial estate in Leyton, east London.

[29][30] Upon her death, she was described as "immensely courageous, independent and determined in both her art and her lifestyle" by the Alan Cristea Gallery, who represented her for twenty years.

[31] Her work was shown posthumously, alongside that of Rachel Jones and Nao Matsunaga in 2019 at the New Art Centre, Salisbury, Wiltshire.